TRADING in agribusiness company Elders Ltd was suspended by the Australian Stock Exchange this morning as the company prepares to announce a capital-raising.
Elders requested the immediate trading halt while it undertook a bookbuild prior to a capital-raising announcement.
The trading halt will remain in place until trading starts on Monday, September 15, Elders makes an announcement or it requests trading should resume.
Elders has been selling non-core assets to reduce debt and chief executive Mark Allison recently announced the company’s proposed sale of its half share in the national logistics company AWH Pty Ltd, and Charlton feedlot in Victoria represented “substantial completion of Elders’ program to sell non-core assets and reduce term debt.”
Market sources believe the capital-raising is being undertaken to further reduce debt and re-capitalise the business to pursue its eight-point plan for development.
The plan has a strategic intent to grow the company to a sustainable EBIT of $60 million and ROC of 20 percent in 2017, by offering value-creating products and services through its Australian and international agribusiness networks.
Key elements of the plan include development and implementation of capital efficiency and capital reduction programs.
In the financial services sector the company aims to refine long-term Joint Venture (JV) agreements on mutually beneficial terms and review JV partners where appropriate.
The plan also encompasses development and implementation of a foreign investment group to capture international new business opportunities.
Some announcements have to be delayed supposedly to stop being gazumped. other things simply block the vision of those people, an institutions too, which support the company, leaving them high and dry…those people who get companies off the ground are those with the least legal claim in liquidation or even a right to know. Raising capital by shares is a legalised screw-over but worse perhaps are the day trader parasites who milk others for money, a sort of corporate terrorist group. Elders has been up and down like a yoyo with these buy-sell, buy-sell anarchists on the move. The patient and hopeful shareholder simply gets snowed. If Elders is going to start a book spree I hope it issues dividends quick smartly. Of course under the Act they can spend their money almost as they wish without ever paying a dividend but is indecency and avarice the modern learn by rote management compulsion or could we see boards starting to employ executives …please… who’d management skills have more than a piece of paper and a few mates looking after each other…people with inherited or inherent skills and deeply seated responsibility. That might not suit the cannibals and plunderers but it might form a nucleus of Australian-minded corporations who’s lifeblood is not avarice or angelic greed hidden behind machinations of the indigenous at home or abroad….nor who, as happened to Elders are done over from the inside by treachery whether in the NT or any other state or nation. Voila